A serious review

Here is a serious attempt at reviewing a book - please let me know! You can comment if you don't have a profile, just make it anonymous. I wont be offended.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

When King gleefully recounted the moment when, in second grade, he thought it would be sensible to do his business in the woods and wipe his arse with poison ivy – I was hooked!

King uses a mixture of sarcastic, black humour and amusing anecdotes to keep the reader hooked. It is a book about the prolific author's experiences as a writer.

Although he discusses several of his books, one doesn't need to have read them or even be familiar with them to read On Writing.

Beginning from his early memories of his flatulent baby sitter, Eula-Beulah, King recounts his growth both as a person and as a writer. It’s broken into three sections.

The first section centres on King's early exposure to fiction, his breakthrough success with Carrie and a no nonsense overview of his battle with alcoholism.

Interspersed with notes on his family life, meeting his wife and his early work as a high school English teacher, this section is paced well – with the reader engaged constantly. King’s journalistic style of eliminating unnecessary words means the section is finished before you know it, without a single wasted letter.

The pace is taken down a notch in the second section – which is a shame.

The second section is advice on writing, and some of the best advice I’ve come across since Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. From tips on grammar to ideas about developing plot and character, King describes it as a guide for how "a competent writer can become a good one." He places particular stress on his belief that a writer should edit out unnecessary details and avoid the use of adverbs.

He uses excerpts from other writers and offers exercises to fine tune characters. This necessarily makes this section a lot less fun than the first. The good humour is gone – replaced by the serious tone that comes from a desire that whoever is reading will at least learn something.

The third section is shifts back to autobiographical and concerns the 1999 car accident that nearly killed King, and his struggle to start writing again.

The tone is necessarily sombre here, but King is comfortable in his role as story teller as opposed to teacher. His comfort allows the reader to once again shut off and lose themselves in the plot that unfolds while King recounts the accident.

Despite the lull in the middle, King makes a convincing foray into non-fiction. His advice is solid and useful. His narrative style in recounting his life reminds us why he is such a popular novelist in the first place.

If you’re going to read one Writing How to Guide this year – make it On Writing by little Stevie King – the boy who was vetoed from the Honour Role in High school because “a boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn’t belong in a smart people’s club.”